ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the changing relationship between space and population in the production of population knowledge. In the modern era, population experts have focused on the size and quality of populations and on space and spatial distributions. The chapter deals with migration and migration control, investigating how demographic arguments as well as changing knowledge of the make-up of societies came to influence migration politics; it also examines the lack of living space as a major topic of racist and imperialist thinking in the first half of the twentieth century. Eugen M. Kulischer's work illustrates the relationship between population and migration thinking in the first half of the twentieth century, scholars repeatedly used the notion of an overpopulated or an empty space to justify violent conflict, in the form of war or colonialism. Geographers, politicians, and bureaucrats presented geopolitical strategies that aimed to extend the territorial basis of national rule as a crucial part of successful national policy.
